Di-licious

I'm in a very, VERY good mood this week. Why? Well for starters, I finally landed my dream part time job. The company is a gourmet food producer and I'll be actively involved with promoting their products through food tastings as well as behind the scenes in the office and (hopefully) helping develop their website. I may even get my hands messy in the kitchen sometimes..... The other reason I'm very happy this week is discovering my ultimate, perfect cake nirvana - this (very) Special Lemon Coconut Cake. The recipe comes from the Country Women's Association Classics Cookbook. It was contributed by Mrs Elaine Youd from Devonport Branch, Tasmania who shared that it is her "friend Barb Parson's special cake". Special is definitely the right way to describe this cake. The coconut keeps the cake lovely and moist, making it a great bake ahead affair. It freezes well and the icing......well tangy lemon juice icing with coconut... it just keeps the l...

I love it when a plan comes together. I had a huge tub of sour cream sitting in the fridge needing to be used and a couple of tired lemons languishing in the fruit bowl. Inspired by the success of my one bowl,   1st Prize Chocolate Cake, I threw everything in, crossed my fingers and hoped for the best. The cake gods were smiling down on me. These cakelets are good in every way a lemon cake ought to be: Tangy and moist with a zingy lemon icing They’re soooooooooo easy to make. They get better with time – make them a day ahead and continue to enjoy any leftovers the day after. They'd be perfect for a Mother's Day afternoon tea, dressed up with some sugar flowers. I call them cakelets because they're small and not baked in papers. A cake release spray like Wilton’s Easy Bake is your best friend here. If you're nervous about your cakes sticking, bake them in pretty cases instead. It’s your tea party after all! RECI...

Everybody needs a good basic chocolate cake recipe and they certainly don't get any easier than this. Put all of the ingredients into a bowl and mix it together for 3 minutes. That’s it. No fancy baking super powers required (and certainly a lot easier than a packet mix!) Better still it tastes great, cuts like a dream, and it makes two loaf cakes so you can serve one up for morning tea and pop the other one in the freezer for a rainy day. Did I mention that it's a prize winning recipe too? This darling little cake won me first prize in the Chocolate Cake category at the 2013 Mornington Peninsula Group CWA Competition. Just sayin..... Recipe: 1st Prize Chocolate Cake Recipe adapted from Merle Parish’s two chocolate cake recipes in Merle’s Kitchen (2012) Ingredients 1¾ cups self raising flour, sifted 1¼ cups caster sugar ½ cup cocoa, sifted 2 tsp bicarbonate soda, sifted pinch salt 125g unsalted butter, softened and chopped up 2 eggs, room temperature, ...

Arrrrghhhhh! Captain Olive and her scurvy crew of pirates celebrated on the high seas this weekend with a Pirate Birthday Party to remember. Mr Di-licious and I had a lot of fun putting it all together - from making the bunting and treasure bags to constructing the 'Pirate's Den' and last but not least the food. Captain Olive The Pirate Barbie Cake Olive's birthday cake this year brought together four of her favourite things: Barbie, pirates, cake and chocolate. The vanilla buttercake was filled with blackberry jam and vanilla buttercream before being swathed in chocolate ganache and the chocolate fondant skirt. I found the Barbie pirate costume on eBay and had it shipped over from the US. So what do you feed a horde of hungry pirates? ----x---- Pirate Party Menu Fish finger boats Octopus frankfurts Pirate hat Oreo pops Buried treasure chocolate crackles Chocolate dipped [pretzel] swords Pirate Barbie cake Tropical ...

This year I started my own family Christmas tradition with Olive.  We made the fruit cake together.  She helped me stir the fruit every day for two weeks and stood next to me while I made up the cake batter. While the cakes baked we played Barbies and read stories. It was a very special time for us, one I hope we will continue to share each year. No doubt she'll still be stealing the glace cherries and macadamias out of the mixture when she's 21! I only made this cake for the first time last year.  I'm not a fruit cake fan myself but Mr Di-licious is.  His only Christmas wish last year was for a fruit cake. Not having a family recipe to turn to, I did the next best thing; I consulted the Australian Womens Weekly Test Kitchen (AWWTK). I know some purists out there will criticise me for this but I fiddled with the fruit.  I have enough stuff sitting in my pantry without having half open bags of glace apricots and pineapple.  I just use...

When decorating birthday cakes, I love finding a way to make them a little less ordinary.  My almost mother in law (Mr Di-licious and I haven’t made it down the aisle, yet) loves quilling . I’ve never done quilling myself but I thought it would make an excellent design feature for her 70 th birthday cake. Quilling is essentially rolled up strips of paper, arranged into beautiful patterns. I figured it wouldn’t be too hard to emulate the effect with thin strips of fondant.  A couple of attempts later, I realised I really needed to use gumpaste. The strips need to be rolled out really thin, allowed to dry slightly and then rolled up– quilled. I made a variety of different shapes in different colours as well as a stylised 7-0. The final design didn’t follow an existing pattern – it just sort of happened.  If you look closely you can see flower shapes in there. The tablecloth idea was actually a work around.  Originally I’d planned to ...

It seemed like a good idea at the time. Drive to Byron Bay for my sister's wedding so we could transport the wedding cake I'd made her. A six day break where we spent four days in the car. Insane right? Did I mention I made a wedding cake? Not your quintessential tiered, fondant creation mind you.  In a nod to our Norwegian heritage, my sister asked me to make a traditional wedding cake called kransekake. If you haven’t seen one before, kransekake isn’t actually a cake; it’s a tower of eighteen sweet almond macaroon rings – think baked marzipan – ‘glued’ together with royal icing.  Instead of cutting the cake, the bride and groom lift the top ring.  The number of rings that stay attached to the top ring is supposed to signify how many children the happy couple will be blessed with.  The rings are then broken up into pieces (starting from the bottom) and served with coffee.  The dough is a cinch to make but its the baking that brin...

A few weeks ago I was given a wonderful gift - a bowl full of freshly picked backyard apples, via my sister-in-law Kaz.  We're not sure what variety there were, heirloom perhaps? But they were crisp and sweet and I thought they'd be perfect for baking. They sat pretty in a bowl for a week or so, filling the dining room with their gorgeous apple scent while I decided what to bake. An apple pie was inevitable but I really wanted to make some little cakes too.  I consulted my bookshelf and put on my thinking cap and voilà; gorgeous mini apple-almond cakes. The almond meal made the cakes quite dense - almost a hybrid of a slice and cake, and kept the cake di-liciously moist.  The glaze of apricot jam and sugar syrup was a master stroke! And the thin fan of apple slices just look so darn pretty.  Great job I thought! I made copious hand written notes and snapped away ready for a future blog post.  Then I did a quick pack up of the house before Mr...

I've been missing in action.  The winter school holidays started and all of a sudden I found myself out of the house for two weeks. Away with girlfriends, staying with family, away from my laptop and reliable internet and out of mobile phone range. Excuses, excuses! In my rush to go gallivanting around the countryside, I forgot to show off the third birthday cake I made for Mr Di-licious - the Country Music cake! It's true Mr Di-licious loves both kinds of music as well as Earl Grey Tea and chocolate - so this cake for his party at home with a few friends was the perfect opportunity for me to have a little fun at his expense. This chocolate cake (using my favourite chocolate party cake recipe) is filled with salted dulce de leche and covered in dark chocolate ganache. The blue base tile, numbers and 'wooden paling' letters are made out of fondant.  The letters are hand cut and textured with a leaf veiner. I used biscuit cutters to cut out the numbers...

We’re celebrating one year of Di-licious Cupcakes and now it’s time for me to give you your present – my Triple Chocolate Party Cake recipe. This sweet, moist chocolate cake is the perfect base for a large celebration cake , cupcakes or as this simply elegant cake with cream and ganache.  It’s truly a cake for every celebration. A hint of coffee helps to temper the sweetness of the cake and lets the chocolate flavour shine.  The semi-sweet chocolate cream and chocolate ganache makes it a show stopper (just don’t tell anyone how easy it was to make!) The cake is also perfectly happy to be baked ahead of time and frozen.  In fact it’s better if you do; it’s easier to trim and tort the cake when it’s still semi-frozen.  Likewise you can make the ganache ahead of time to make decorating a breeze. Could this be the world’s best chocolate cake?  Recipe: Triple Chocolate Party Cake Serves 4-6  Recipe adapted from Donna Hay   Recip...

Making one cake for the man you love is hard. Try making three to celebrate his 40th birthday! Unlike a normal cake order where the client specifies the flavour, shape, filling and decoration, Mr Di-licious simply said “Surprise me”. Humph....I think that’s worse. One cake down and the next needed in only a few days, inspiration finally struck one morning in the shower – make him an Earl Grey tea flavoured cake. Brilliant! My first scan of the web found lots of tea cakes but they were more church picnic than milestone birthday. It’s a celebration cake and in my world that means a creamy filling and chocolate. Chocolate and Earl Grey?  Suspend belief and take it from me: it works mate... it does! Time was short so instead of experimenting, I let my eyes do the walking through Google Images to find a recipe I could use. I was instantly smitten by a cake by Cultivate Online : The Queen’s Earl Grey Fudge Cake - a chocolate and earl grey tea cake, filled with earl grey fl...